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On the back of the rule book it mentions registering your game and that there is trading strategies as well as other goodies on the site, I found the goodies, I was wondering where the trading strategies are? Of course if there are none so far I guess this is a good as place as any for others to start offering up their gameplay tips!

Thanks for a fun game. I was lucky enough to win one on Board Game Geeks. We had our first game last night and we really enjoyed it.

We played last weekend. The winning player adopted a strategy of placing ALL of his ships in the black market every turn. While the others fought over 2, 3, and 4 pieces of cargo, he would get 5 cargo items for free each turn.

The last few games we noticed the player(s) who HEAVILY favored the Black Market "Random pick" Did well from the onset and continued to perform and have more purchase opportunities than others. MUCH better than people bidding on goods (unless you pulled off the 1 gold freebies)

Tonight we noticed the same thing (as this thread mentions) where one player, after getting their 5th cargo ship by round 2, played the whole game in the black market getting the 5 random cards then using their strategy of choosing to sell, for the most part, all single good cards. (Never pairing them up).

Needless to say they won and I'll say easily this was mainly because they were picking up 5+ single card Victory Point purchases almost every turn with 40+ point purchases 'here and there'.

Now I find the 'strategy' lacking, but it is valid game play within the rules as I understand them.

We can easily say that biding and building 'trade' faster should beat this strategy but we did notice the 'downtime' after hard bidding crippled you for a round to recoup cash and that caused any gain we make to be lost.

Anyhoo...

My question(s) am I missing something in the black market rule or was this 'all out Black Market' strategy missed by the developers.

It is just that you are not valuing your bidding correctly to beat that strategy. If you are all competing and overpaying it is likely you will lose to someone going off in a direction all alone and unchallenged I think that is common in a lot of games.